I used Puppy to rejuvenate an elderly laptop (500MHz PIII, 64MB RAM, 4GB hard disk) that was too slow to run Windows ME properly and it ran like a dream with Puppy. The programs are mostly chosen for their lightweight nature- rather than the latest Firefox it uses the very simple Dillo browser, for instance, with the result that it can run on even the oldest computers. It's pretty full featured- has a browser, email, instant messenging, basic office software (writer, spreadsheet), drawing programs, music and DVD player, CD burner and a lot of system administration tools for things like partitioning and formatting hard drives which make it very useful as a system rescue disk. The entire operating system is 50MB in size, meaning it will also fit on a USB stick the size that you can get free from career fairs- this is worth doing as you can save files onto the remainder of the stick to use with Puppy if you don't want it to touch your hard disk. Puppy Linux is a Linux live cd- throw it in your CD drive, turn your computer on, make sure the BIOS is set to check for bootable CDs and it will fire up. Puppy is not meant to be a replacement for your primary desktop OS. OK- I'm not going to debate which OS is better, all the many reasons you should use Linux, religious arguments, any of that.
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